Mesocellular silica foam (MCF) is a kind of new mesoporous silica material found in 1999, with the largest pore size (up to 50nm) of all mesoporous materials synthesized to date, which has the three dimensional cubic mesopore structure of a typical foam phase. The specific surface area reaches 1 000m2/g, and the pore size and pore volume are large. Relatively large spherical pores are interconnected by small pores.
Compared to the mesoporous materials of MCM and SBA series with relatively small pore size, MCF has large specific surface area and pore size and it is scalable. Its specific 3D foam structure characteristics have a great theoretical research significance and wide application prospect in various fields. For example, as a catalyst support, it is beneficial to the mass transfer and diffusion of reactants and products by increasing the metal loading. Recently, several studies have applied it to the esterification solidification of alcohol, hydrogenation, dehydrogenation, CO2 adsorption, hydrogen peroxide synthesis, etc., which has shown its excellent performance.
Plasma treatment, a gas phase treatment technique combined with a kind of physical and chemical method, has several advantages like no pollution, low energy consumption, no water consumption and no use of chemical reagents. In particular, low temperature plasma treatment causes physical and chemical changes near the surface of materials to be treated, while maintaining their own properties. Therefore, low temperature plasma treatment is of great importance in the functionalization of materials surface.
Mun Se Hyon, a researcher at the Institute of Nano Science and Technology, has carried out a surface modification treatment in the mesoporous material pore channel using dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) with 3D mesocellular silica foam (MCF) as a support, and investigated the effect of plasma treatment conditions on the reaction on MCF surface.
First, he synthesized mesocellular silica foam (MCF) by sol-gel method and treated the surface of MCF by DBD to enhance its surface activity. After plasma treatment, he modified amine groups on the MCF pore channel surface.
To investigate the effect of plasma treatment on the mesoporous material MCF support, he modified amine groups on both treated and untreated MCF surfaces. Then, he compared the specific surface area of catalyst support MCF-NH2 synthesized by the two methods and the amount of -OH in the pore channel via nitrogen adsorption and desorption analysis (BET), infrared spectroscopy (IR) and thermo gravimetric (TG) analysis.
The results showed that plasma treatment greatly influences the pore structure of the mesoporous material MCF, and even the activity of the MCF surface obtained.
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